Something not right at crime scene, officer tells Sorella’s murder trial
Testimony comes in case of mother accused of killing daughters, 8 and 9
Valérie Daunais was patrolling in Laval’s Chomedey district around 4:30 p.m. when the call came through on her police radio: there was a child found in a nearby home unconscious and not breathing. Daunais turned to her partner, who was only in her second week on the job, and started explaining what needed to be done. Then more information came through: there was a second unconscious child. “That’s not normal,” she told her partner. “Call for backup, call for assistance.” Daunais, who at times choked up, recalled that day while testifying in Adele Sorella’s murder trial on Wednesday. Sorella, 52, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her daughters, Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8, on March 31, 2009. Daunais said the officers made it to the house about six minutes after the call came in. There was a beige Chrysler in the driveway and a white Ford Ranger parked in the street. All the lights were off inside. A man and woman greeted them in the entrance hall. “Hurry, hurry,” the man said. “In there,” the woman added, pointing toward the family’s playroom. In the room, Daunais could see the two girls were on the floor, side-by-side on their backs. Another man was above one of them, talking to emergency services over the phone about how to perform resuscitation techniques. The two police officers took over, placing CPR pocket masks over the girls’ mouths and noses. “Val, the air isn’t going through, it’s not passing,” Daunais recalled her partner saying. “Do what you can,” she answered. “Backup is coming.” But their attempts were to no avail. After describing the scene Wednesday, Daunais was asked what else she remembered from inside the playroom. Something didn’t seem right, she answered. The two sisters were so close together that they were almost touching, she said. “They looked like they had been dropped there,” she said of the girls. “They didn’t look like they had collapsed to the ground.” In its opening statement this week, the Crown said it intends to prove Sorella, who has pleaded not guilty, had the “exclusive opportunity” to kill her two daughters. It has told the jury Sorella was suicidal in the time leading to the deaths and had been struggling since her husband, Giuseppe De Vito, fled their home following Project Colisée, a lengthy police investigation targeting organized crime. The jury has also been shown several photos of a hyperbaric chamber found inside the home that was used to treat Sabrina’s juvenile arthritis. Earlier Wednesday, while cross-examining crime scene technician Manon Sauvageau, defence lawyer Pierre Poupart challenged how thoroughly the chamber was analyzed by experts. Poupart questioned Sauvageau at length over whether it was properly protected while being transferred from Sorella’s home to the police force’s warehouse. He argued she couldn’t know how many people had manipulated it and when. The defence team also questioned police witnesses on how much they knew about Sorella’s husband, and focused its questions on the number of security cameras noticed on the house, including one that was affixed to a city-owned lamp post outside. The trial continues Thursday.